Thursday
Jun092011
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Quote of the day
Jun 9, 2011 Bureaucrats Quotes A visiting journalist once asked the director of a famous research institute: " How many scientists work in your laboratory?"
The director reflected for a moment and then replied "Less than half".
From Nigel Calder's Technopolis
Reader Comments (20)
Must not have been a Climate Lab. The number of people actually working is way too high!
It is odd that we have not seen an explosion of 'climate labs'. Great hangars filled with various mixes of air and CO2, and various surface and radiative heating distributions. Given the squillions at stake, it would seem a minor cost indeed. But instead, the powers that be meekly accept the advice of such as the Royal Society that the models are to be believed as some kind of modern-day gospel. Data, whether observational or experimental (as per those hangars) seems all but irrelevant. I think perhaps the theoretical-geographers, the programmers, and the political activists have had more sway than they really deserve - none of them need be detained by data for long.
http://www.see.leeds.ac.uk/people/index.php
This school of environmental sciences at Leeds seems to be doing OK for numbers, and presumably for research money, but whether they all work is not stated.
H/T John Horne Tooke on Biased BBC
It is odd that we have not seen an explosion of 'climate labs'.
All you need is a computer and some "data" you collect from the dust bin. Next thing you know someone will be sell iPhone apps to predict the future climate.
Is that the best you can do Your Grace? That joke is so old it must have whiskers on it!
Have you heard about the humour section in an environmentalist bookshop?
There isn't one.
Ah, the old ones are the best!
On the topic of quotes;
Prince (WWF) Philip to the BBC today on the question: "Are you a green?"
"No. There is a difference between being concerned for the conservation of nature and being a bunny hugger."
What proportion of the population feels offended by his princely remarks this time I wonder: perhaps "less than half"?
Q. Why do climate scientists never use a shoogily stool to change a light bulb?
A. Because the're convinced that there has to be a tipping point.
Okay I will get my coat...
Thatcher is vert funy!
If less than half is working consensus Will be for the ones That are not working...
lapogus - "a shoogily stool". Isn't life wonderful; you can learn something new every day. But perhaps you all knew about shoogily, I'm not fluent in Scottish. I presume the stool is of the wooden variety and not related to any of the wisecracks at Climate Audit about Raymond Bradley's Outhouse.
Grant - indeed, the wooden variety. Ta for the link to the CA post - very amusing and amazing that Bradley could equate the hockey stick with anything solid. Shoogily was most commonly used in the expression, "aye, his jaiket's on a shoogly peg", a euphemism for an incompetent whose employment situation is rather insecure. For some reason the cloakroom in the Meteorology and Atmospheric Science department at Penn State springs to mind...
To the naughty corner for you, Bish. "FEWER than half".
I was frequently told by advertising persons, when I owned businesses, that I should double my spend on advertising on the basis that 'everyone knows' that only half of advertising actually works, but nobody knows which half!
The upper limit for the proportion of workers in an hierarchical organisation, and science is hierarchical, is 0.5. This comes from C. N. Parkinson as an empirical observation in agricultural ministries. Also, it was proved mathematically in a letter to 'Nature' about 30 years' ago by establishing the ratio of administrators to workers at which the work per administrator was a minimum in an hierarchical organisation: it's unity, the minimum of a parabolic function.
However, you also have service workers; cleaners, postal staff etc [HR doesn't count because it's part of administration], so the number of workers is usually far less than half the total.
Having learnt today that Paul Nurse was/is a lefty, we also have to add to this union branches and agitprop. Perhaps the 'Royal Society of London for the improvement of Natural Knowledge', to give it its full title, should be re-branded 'The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge so long as it Complies With current Marxist Dogma'.
PS, the right hand side of the 'parabolic function' shows that when an organisation deliberately creates more than one administrator per worker, the workload per administrator increases. This is why you occasionally get, in organisations with unlimited funding, an Administrative Black Hole'.
"a bunny hugger"
I hope I can avoid Spoonerisms when I'm 90!
"FEWER than half"
I should have thought that 'less than' was correct, half being less than one. There is an implied '..of them' I suppose, but as written it's correct, as we would expect of the Bishop!
"more than one administrator per worker"
IIRC, there was an episode of 'Yes Minister' that involved a newly-opened hospital, which was running perfectly smoothly in the eyes of the administrators, as it had no doctors, nurses or patients...
Commonn problem. Labour minister Digby Jones on the civil service
""Frankly the job could be done with half as many, it could be more productive, more efficient, it could deliver a lot more value for money for the taxpayer.
"I was amazed, quite frankly, at how many people deserved the sack and yet that was the one threat that they never ever worked under, because it doesn't exist."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7830521.stm
Thanks for that, Mike. I have a huge collection of useless information myself, much of it collected during boring and irrelevant 'in-service' courses in my days as a teacher, courses where presenting topics similar to teaching garndmothers to suck eggs would have been quite radical and innovative .
Even though I am officially retired, I am still an ardent collector; I have noticed that much in this category comes from the American business school practice of turning a kernel of wisdom into a truck-load of trite aphorisms, which has led to the awful practice of writing contentless fatuous 'mission statements' for any enterprise that employs more than one person.
Alexander K : for any enterprise that employs more than one person.
Can you name an enterprise that employs fewer than one? ('Fewer' for numbers, 'less for quantites'.)
Aphorisms - the word reminds me oddly of some famous headlines from newspapers.
Miners Refuse to Work after Death
Cold Wave Linked to Temperatures
Red Tape Holds Up New Bridges
Kids Make Nutritious Snacks
etc.
Geoff S, I suspect your lovely headlines (which remind me of time spent filling in for a sick teacher in Form 3 English classes) are not aphorisms but I am having a senior moment and can't think of the category thefit in, apart from 'schoolboy howler'.
Help, someone!